The Tweets of War

The author Chuck Klosterman recently wrote, “Following any event on Twitter radically amplifies the illusion of its import. It makes you believe things matter far more than they do.” New Yorker readers defined Twitter as “Logorrhea, in brief,” which is to say, excessive and often incoherent wordiness in a hundred and forty characters or less. News outlets and the people employed by them use it to broadcast the fruits of their labor. But Twitter is rarely the place where one finds significant pronouncements.

That changed this past Wednesday, when the Israel Defense Force, around 7 A.M. Pacific Time, announced via Twitter, “The IDF has begun a widespread campaign on terror sites & operatives in the #Gaza Strip, chief among them #Hamas & Islamic Jihad targets.” Then: “The first target, hit minutes ago, was Ahmed Al-Jabari, head of the #Hamas military wing: http://www.idfblog.com/2012/11/14/idf-begins-widespread-attack-on-terror-sites-in-the-gaza-strip/.” The official Twitter account of Israel’s military then tweeted a mug shot of Jabari bathed in a red more fire-truck than blood. Below the unfazed face, a box read “ELIMINATED,” in thick white block letters. The I.D.F. tweeted on Wednesday: “Israelis living near the #Gaza Strip have been living under fire for the past 12 years”; “Since the beginning of 2012, Palestinian terrorists in the #Gaza Strip have fired 768 rockets into #Israel”; and then, “All options are on the table. If necessary, the IDF is ready to initiate a ground operation in Gaza.”

In the intervening days, @IDFSpokesperson and @AlqassamBrigade, the official account of Hamas’s military arm, have taken part in what we would ordinarily call a sparring match. But this is live military action, in the skies and perhaps soon on the ground. Over a hundred have died from Israeli air strikes in the past six days, and many hundreds more have been wounded. The words being tweeted are more than back-alley threats by big boys with bravado. This is a whole new mechanism and a whole new monster, one pulling out every propaganda stop in what Israel calls Operation Pillar of Defense. The I.D.F. Flickr account parades Hamas’s rocket-launch sites alongside well-produced infographics announcing how many millions of Israelis are under fire, or within range. The military’s newly created Tumblr shows leaflets in Arabic dispersed around the Gaza Strip, warning residents to “take responsibility for yourselves and avoid being present in the vicinity of Hamas operatives and facilities and those of other terror organizations that pose a risk to your safety… until quiet is restored to the region.” Their Pinterest is all glory photos of I.D.F. soldiers who’ve “waited and trained long and hard” receiving the “highly coveted red beret,” and shots of noble humanitarian aid. On Saturday, the I.D.F. Facebook page posted, “400 Rockets from Gaza hit Israel in the last 3 days.” By the following day, over ten thousand people had shared this, over nine thousand had liked it, and over six thousand had commented. Both sides have published images of children slain: a classically effective tactic.

Twitter has been instrumental during past moments of political upheaval, typically as a means for citizens to communicate outside the wrath of oppressive states (such as in the Arab Spring). But news, and precedent, were broken here: this is a narration of real, physical violence by the agents of violence, all as the violence is being wrought. And this raises a number of questions for the start-up giants who founded the various platforms. Both Twitter and YouTube temporarily removed content right after the attacks began—the @IDFSpokesperson account, the I.D.F. video showing the strike that slayed Jabari—but they’re back up, and Flickr has said that it will not be removing content from the I.D.F. photostream.

While YouTube’s community guidelines state that “if your video shows someone being physically hurt, attacked, or humiliated, don’t post it,” guidelines are only that, and Google, which owns YouTube, has previously expressed “a bias in favor of people’s right to free expression in everything we do.” Twitter’s terms of service, however, explicitly ban “direct specific threats of violence against others”—and isn’t @IDFSpokesperson’s recommendation “that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground” a specific threat? The company has to tread carefully with what it bans, and it declined requests to comment for this story. But in January, it announced a “country-withheld content” policy, in which the company will block an account at the request of a government. It enforced the policy for the first time last month, when the German police asked Twitter to prevent its nationals from seeing the tweets of a neo-Nazi account. Soon after, Twitter agreed to delete a rash of anti-Semitic French tweets spinning—in a Der Stürmer direction—off the hashtag “a good Jew.”

But France and Germany both allow free speech only up until the denial of the Holocaust; Twitter has enforced these limits at the countries’ request, to combat tweets perpetuating anti-Semitism and disputing crimes of humanity. But what happens when a country itself is tweeting the incendiary language—and when Israel is that country? Are social-media platforms equipped to handle news of bombs flying and about to blow announced across their services? It may be a matter of safety even more than a matter of speech.

According to Jillian York, the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit advocacy and legal organization that works to protect digital rights, “Companies have no obligation to keep up free speech.” That said, she told me that she’s occasionally been surprised at the extent to which Twitter put aside incitement issues and left active accounts of radical militant groups such as Al Shabaab, in Somalia. She told me that no charges have been brought against Twitter for that, and she doesn’t see why they would change their mind with regards to militant language from a state. Under the Communications Decency Act, Twitter is shielded against a range of laws that might otherwise hold the company legally responsible for user content that it hosts. Kurt Opsahl, an attorney with the organization, explained that “the First Amendment protects against government censorship. It seems unlikely that the U.S. government would attempt to require by court order that social-media companies remove the I.D.F. feed…. Even if they did, the material is quite newsworthy, and the First Amendment would likely prevail.” By way of explanation, he went on: “Imagine it is The New Yorker, not Twitter. If The New Yorker published a quote from the I.D.F. threatening Hamas, you would imagine the First Amendment would protect that publication.”

Freedom of speech aside, critics have condemned the I.D.F. as undignified for diminishing the human scale of tragedy, for trivializing war by tweeting it. To counter what’s been called psychological virtual warfare, Anonymous, the hacking collective, has taken certain Web sites offline, including the Bank of Jerusalem and the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and is compiling means for Gaza residents to get online if Israel downs their servers (a “Gaza care package”).

Anonymous may exact a measure of havoc, but Israel’s online behavior shows considerable media savvy; they know how to broadcast their narrative, real loud. The Palestinians have a long way to go before they match Israel’s branding mastery. But then again, Israel’s use of social media hasn’t all been in service of an effective war machine. Over the weekend, the I.D.F., realizing the dangers of citizen journalism, implored Israelis not to attach locations to tweets or photos reporting rocket attacks or siren alerts, to prevent triangulation by Hamas and its allies. Twitter, it seems, is a weapon that can be used by both sides.

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